Frozen Cortex takes the field on PC, Mac, and Linux today

Football season is over here in the United States, but the video game world is ushering in a new iteration of the game. Mode 7's Frozen Cortex has exited Steam Early Access today, giving players the opportunity to pick up the completed product for the first time. And fortunately, some of the Early Access incentives are still active. Namely, players will get an extra giftable copy of the game with purchase.

Frozen Cortex takes the turn-based strategy of Mode 7's successful Frozen Synapse and applies it to the football field. Teams of destructive robots will take the field and players must plan out how to outscore and outwit their opponents. The game will include the single-player Knockout, Global Cortex League, and Randomly Generated Season modes, as well as various multiplayer modes, including ones for custom leagues. Customization will also extend to players, teams, and pitches.

The new trailer for Frozen Cortex can be found below. The game is available now on Steam. Those looking to get a taste of Mode 7's previous efforts before diving into Frozen Cortex are also in luck. The iOS version of Frozen Synapse is currently available for free on the App Store.

Source:
http://www.shacknews.com/article/88228/frozen-cortex-takes-the-field-on-pc-mac-and-linux-today

Remarkable open source and Linux games in 2014

Hello, open gaming fans! In this week's edition we look back at all of the news and stories in 2014 that we covered for open source and Linux games!

Gaming hardware

We've covered quite a bit on this topic in 2014. We started the year withOpenPandora, which further opened its hardware by releasing its designs. We looked at the Oculus VR, who acquired and open sourced their networking engine, and later in the year they released a software development kit. The Raspberry Pi is on the list, with emulating retro OSs. And we covered a few controllers, like the one from Steam, the Microduino-Joypad, and Gamebuino: an 8-bit 'maker movement' Arduino console.

Open source and Linux games

We continued to see an increase of games available on Linux, especially on Steam, but also by other distributors and native Linux games.

Once in a while, we stumbled upon true open source games. The first one we covered was Open source OpenXcom v1.0. And of course, we can't leave out theFOSS ChuChu Rocket clone we've all been waiting for. And, Google released the free and open source game Pie Noon to the Google Play Store in order to highlight multiplayer-gaming for the Nexus Player, an Android TV device.

Start your open gaming engines!

Source:

https://opensource.com/life/14/12/year-review-open-gaming

Concurrent Steam Users Top 8.46 Million In Early Hours Of 2015 / up to date

While Xbox Live and PlayStation Network were experiencing technical difficulties over the holidays, Steam's holiday sale helped it break new records in the number of concurrent users.

Valve's digital games store and service broke the 8.4 million mark on January 1, and according to Steam's Game and Player Statistics page, it reached an all-time high yesterday at 11:10 a.m. with 8,500,245 concurrent users. That's a record for concurrent usage, up from 8,020,700 people back in June 2014.

The number of concurrent Steam users probably peaked during the holiday because people had more free time to play games, and the incentive to keep checking Steam every day because of its annual sale, which introduced new discounts every 12 hours.


Source:
http://full-timewhistle.com/technology-22/concurrent-steam-users-top-8-46-million-in-early-hours-of-2015-1796.html